This was chosen by a book club I’m a member of, but I would’ve also happily read it of my own accord. I think I’ve read ‘The Corrections’ and ‘Freedom’ by this author, but don’t seem to have made any notes. What little I can remember is of vivid characters and flowing prose with a tendency towards loquaciousness and a pretentious habit of using long words. At its best, it can be totally enthralling and easy to consume in large quantities, with the exception of some clunky vocab. I would say this book outperformed these positive half-remembrances for the first few hundred pages and then drastically underperformed them later on.
The book isn’t chronological and we flit back and forth from the past to the ‘present’ day, which plays out over a few years in the early 1970s. The prose has largely lost Franzen’s former florid vocabulary and is highly readable. In a way, it’s hypnotic and soothing. There’s rarely a clunky sentence, with the exception of sex scenes that are littered with references to ‘nether parts’ and other atrocities. As such, it’s easy to gobble down quickly; albeit in a way that half lulls you to sleep. When I managed to stay more awake, I realised it is full of more or less unnecessary stuff, like a couple of pages on how Christianity spread around Europe or a couple of pages on good carsalemanship. It also struck me as a different form of showing off; as opposed to using vocabulary, he uses mansplaining subjects to the reader regardless of whether they’re relevant to the story or not.
I also felt this way about certain parts of the narrative that seemed to have been thrown in incongruently. Taken individually, it doesn’t seem to matter but taken cumulatively it feels indulgent and was probably one of the reasons I felt the book was too long. I think this book could have used some severe editing. Maybe Franzen’s editors feel like he is such a big deal now it’s hard to cut stuff from his drafts or criticise his ideas. At the end of this review there’s a brief precis that attempts to detail the main narratives of the book. It leaves a few things out but not much and looking back I am staggered to think that this story took more than 600 pages to describe.
The characters were engaging and I also liked the depiction of small town 60/70s America and found it believable. The main themes I could detect were, first, an assessment of Christianity as a very strong motivating force in America during this time. Franzen seems to paint it in mixed colours as it is often the motivation for people to do good things but also seems to be the cause of a lot of suffering and bad decisions. Adultery and sexual desire are also fairly readily identifiable themes, which are treated in an even handed and credible way. These positives aside, I found it quite hard to get really excited about the book. It draws you along as a reader, largely on the early strength of the characters, the readable prose and the believable depiction of the world it describes. However, just when you’re really enjoying it and empathising with the characters, the plot turns into something from a soap opera. This is especially the case in the second half, where hysterical and hyperbolic moments abound.
The more action there was in the book, the less I liked it. Nothing much really dramatic happens in the first third or half of the book, although there are references back to Marion’s extremely dramatic past. It was during this part of the book I felt really engaged with the characters, Russ and Perry especially, and I felt they were really well drawn. Once the story shifts to Arizona, things seem to get overblown and out of control. There’s too much action and the story takes on a rushed feeling, like the author can’t wait to finish or is trying to cram as many ideas and plot lines into it as possible. The end of the book is less frantic but has a similarly rushed feeling of tying up loose ends with minimal effort. After the narrative orgy of Arizona, we dash through a brief summary of the lives of each of the main protagonists. It makes for quite a jarring juxtaposition with the more placid pacing of earlier chapters and their quotidian feel. Overall, it gave the book a highly uneven feeling and I didn’t care for the second half at all.
Delusions of grandeur abound in this book’s conception. It was originally a humbly entitled “super novel” of three parts, each 25 years apart. However, the author decided that would be of insufficient scale to encapsulate the scope of his vision and expanded it into a trilogy! To make matters worse, he also chose to name the trilogy “The Key To All Mythologies”, a reference to the Rev Casaubon’s doomed magnum opus from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch”. In fairness to Franzen, he says it's a joke about starting such a long project in his 60s but I think it takes a lot of self belief to draw comparisons between yourself and a book like ‘Middlemarch’.
Each time I read ‘Middlemarch’, I feel like it’s a masterpiece and contains a timeless, lucid depiction of humanity. On finishing this, I felt like I had just binge watched an average soap opera. For this reason, I think inviting comparison with such an amazing novel is a dangerous game for Franzen and one he can only lose from! Reading Eliot is like having a guided tour around humanity by someone who’s mastered its mysterious complexity. Reading Franzen is like the unedited notes of someone who’s good at describing scenes and characters and has mastered the art of suspenseful narratives to link them together. Occasionally, he lights on something great but the approach is so long-winded and hit-or-miss that the overall effect falls far short of the profundity of Eliot. Franzen’s plots are more overblown and less emotionally astute as well.
In the end, I found a promising start deteriorated into a disappointing ending. I’m not sure I would recommend this book or read any more of the trilogy but it certainly had some strong points.
NARRATIVE SUMMARY
A man, Russ, grows up in a weird, insular Mennonnite community. He is excused from military service in WW2 because of his religious beliefs and goes to work on tribal reservation in Arizona with the Army. Here, he forms a bond with some Native Americans and decides he won’t go back to his family. After military service he moves to a city, joins a slightly more normal church and meets a young, fervently Christian woman (Marion) among the congregation. They fall in love and get married, have four children and the husband pursues a career as a priest while the wife looks after the home and children in small town Illinois.
What he doesn’t know is that his fervently Christian wife has a dark past, including a father who committed suicide and a mother who disowned her in the aftermath. Following the disintegration of her family, she moves to LA to become an actress, which fails, and then has an adulterous relationship with a car salesman who gets her pregnant. As if that wasn’t enough, her obsession with the car salesman makes her mentally unstable. She loses her job and then is taken advantage of by a skeevy landlord who drugs and sexually abuses her in exchange for an abortion. Finally she ends up in a mental hospital after being picked up by the police, while drugged, deranged and walking the streets. She meets Russ while living with her uncle after rehab.
We join the story in the early 1970s as the family begins to fray around the edges and then tear apart. Russ is working as an assistant minister, warring with the hip, young leader of the church youth group, Rick, and lusting after a young widow in his congregation. Marion is upset about her weight, secretly in therapy and about to revisit the extreme trauma of her youth.
Child 1, Clem, is away at university and has a girlfriend for the first time. He is having sex, also for the first time, and he will go on to rebel against his father and his pacificist principles by quitting university and trying to enroll in military service to go to Vietnam.
In the past, Clem had been close to Child 2, Becky, but they eventually fall out over Becky’s choice of boyfriend. Becky is a pretty, popular cheerleader but also a bit of a god botherer and muddles along between these two paths before getting a semi-god bothering, musician boyfriend, having a child, moving out and rejecting her parents over their infatuation with Child 3.
Child 3, Perry, is painted as a precocious and naughty boy for drinking and taking drugs. He gets hooked on coke and burns down a farm building on a church youth group trip to Arizona, back where Russ first met the Indians and continues to go for annual church buildathons. This incident lands Perry in juvie / a rehab that his parents can scarcely afford. It also turns out he has been stealing money from his siblings to fund his drug habit. This prompts the parents to use the money Child 2 inherited from her dead aunt, Marion’s sister, and is one of the reasons why Becky resents Perry, as she feels he is overindulged.
Counterintuitively, Perry’s misdemeanours rekindle the parents' love. They continue as a couple in spite of the fact that Russ admits to sleeping with the young widow in Arizona, which represents the geographical hot spot where most of the storylines climax. Child 4, Judson, is pretty young during all this and doesn’t play a major role. We leave the family with Clem having failed to get into the army but still estranged from his parents. Becky is living with her partner and child but rejecting her parents.
